On the go and no time to finish that story right now? Your News is the place for you to save content to read later from any device. Register with us and content you save will appear here so you can access them to read later.

The Ministry of Education is defending the controversial teachers' pay system Novopay this evening, saying more than 92,000 school staff were paid correctly overnight.

But Labour MP Nanaia Mahuta says Parliament still needs to get to the bottom of what's gone wrong with the system after its most recent "debacle".

A spokesperson for the Ministry said tonight that fewer than 20 non-payments and underpayments were identified today and they were working with Novopay developers Talent2 to ensure unpaid staff are paid as quickly as possible and other glitches are "ironed out".

Records show that 494 transactions from last night's pay cycle - which do not all impact on wages and salary - have not been processed.

Group manager Rebecca Elvy said the Ministry had been "working hard to ensure a successful pay run".

"I'm pleased to see the figures are an improvement on previous cycles. However, although fewer than in previous pay cycles, some people are still not being paid and that is not acceptable."

She said the fall in payroll errors had been "dramatic" and the focus was also on clearing the backlog of unprocessed transactions from the initial Novopay pay cycles.

"This backlog now stands at 463 and will be cleared very soon."

Parliament needs to sort out 'debacle'

But Mrs Mahuta - Labour's education spokeswoman - has written to the chairperson of Parliament's Education and Science Committee, calling for it to hold an inquiry into the $30 million teachers' pay system, introduced in August this year.

She said the latest overnight glitch is just the latest in a series of problems plaguing the system "since day one".